Milgram invited me to his office and told me not to talk about my research results in America as American teachers are “too weak” to be able to work in the ways shown to be effective.

If you believe there are harmful truths that should not be published, you don't belong in research. You belong in a PR department. I know exactly what this guy Milgram is getting at: in my experience as a student, progressive methods were occasionally wielded effectively by a few of my best teachers, but most teachers used them to take a break from engaging with the material and puff up the grades of the kids who were struggling. That's no excuse for wanting to hide research that shows innovative methods did work under certain circumstances, especially since research documents what those circumstances were. Anyway, like I said, if you believe there are harmful truths that should not be published, you don't belong in academia. That would disqualify virtually everybody outside the hard sciences, of course, and probably many people inside the hard sciences as well. ("So what if dihydroxomayonnaise isn't an effective twinzoblane above bike pants temperature? If we get distracted by that the field will be set back five years! Dihydroxo-condiment studies needs this grant money!")

It's hard to tell when bullying in academia is just a dramatic word for politics. People fight to entrench certain ideologies and stigmatize others, professors fight over control of departments, careers are threatened or ruined. I knew a girl in college who had her Master's thesis written and practically approved. Then her advisor suddenly left the department, and her advisor's vanquisher told her the paper was unacceptable in toto and had to be rewritten from scratch. My friend had been pondering an academic career, but this made up her mind: she got her MA by examination and decided against graduate school (she got the MA at the same time as her BA.)

You can't overlook that one guy in this story had the campus police show up at his home because he said "nuke 'em" with respect to schools of education. This raises two questions. First, by this standard, how many people here have been careful enough with language to avoid police investigation? Second, can you imagine the pressure that must have been put on the police to force them to take time away from their real work because one faculty member wanted to stigmatize another as potentially violent? The other justification for co-opting the police into this dispute was "personal attacks on my work," which doesn't pass the smell test; if you don't distinguish between personal criticisms and criticisms on your work, then you will feel under personal attack all the time. That's a choice. You can separate personal criticism from professional criticism and label the former inappropriate, but if you don't make an effort to distinguish the two, don't come begging for sympathy.

So here we have two groups of academics: each casting aspersions on the others' research; each trying to sabotage the others' careers; one group calling the other dishonest and the other group responding with accusations of bullying and illegal conduct. Both sides have accused the other of subverting academic integrity, by data fabrication on one side and by trying to identify research subjects on the other. I think both sides are doing a splendid job of bullying, no doubt glowing in the self-righteous pleasure of fighting against evil. I think I know which side I would agree with about the research (though it might not be a coincidence that I tend to agree with the one side whose case has been presented to me) but I wouldn't say one side was better than the other just by virtue of being right about the academic point they're fighting over.

EDIT: It was bugging me to have only one side of the story, so I did a quick google search. It isn't much, but perhaps it's better than nothing: http://mathforum.org/kb/servlet/JiveServlet/download/206-116...

I think the safest conclusion here is that we have two people engaged in your usual petty no-holds-barred academic playground fight. I'm prepared to believe that they're both harmless and both completely civilized in any other context. Getting the authorities involved still strikes me as creepy, but they were just campus cops, so I'm prepared to see even that as childish harassment rather than a serious threat.